As children of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when the progression of civilization has seemed to reach its limit and our every resource is at our disposal, it is easy to take aspects of our society for granted. It is difficult not to assume that these aspects, such as music, simply popped into being of their own accord. I was certainly guilty of this for the better part of my youth; as I grew older, however, and started to realize that everything within our society was the result of hundreds of years of collective efforts of many civilizations, I became infinitely curious about the processes by which these things came about. As music has been a significant part of my life since I was an infant, I decided to start with it, and to explore the series of events that served as the foundation to the continuously evolving realm of western music. One aspect that stood out in particular to me was the culture surrounding the art of the troubadours and trouvéres, who were the first poets to convey a range of emotions through a vernacular language. As the majority of modern western music is composed in the vernacular language, this was a pivotal point in the course of music history.
In order to fully grasp any artistic concept, an adequate knowledge of the historical context is necessary, as art serves as a snapshot of the culture from which it is created. Aquitaine, a territory in the southern part of what is now France, is where the first signs of a new tradition began to arise around the eleventh century. Charlemagne had successfully conquered Aquitaine towards the end of the eighth century and made an attempt to merge it into his own empire. He encouraged intellectual and artistic growth among his people and sponsored the construction of numerous schools. This, coupled with the recent economic prosperity and abundance of resources, led to the development of a strong middle class. After the death of his son, Louis the Pious, however, the empire divided. German kings, leaders of what became the Holy Roman Empire, claimed the land, but most of the power over the duchy slid into the hands of noblemen. The counts in the Poitou region eventually proved to be the most powerful and hastily assumed the title of Duke. This sense of unity between the smaller territories served as a safety blanket that eliminated “the necessity of continual combat” to maintain order. With few enemies to outwardly defend against, a period of peace emerged, providing copious amounts of leisure time to the knights of Provence. Since the knights lacked a battlefield to distinguish themselves upon, they instead turned towards lavish lifestyles, in which each competed to have the best fashions, delicacies, housing, and entertainment. It was during this temporary peace that the “courtly poetic and musical traditions” that served as the foundation for the troubadour tradition began to bloom.
While Latin remained a language for the well-educated and elite, the recently prosperous middle class began to develop languages of their own assimilated from the various languages brought forth from barbarians throughout the years. The first documented works of troubadour art come from William (Guillaume) IX, who came from the Poitiers region in Southern France. William wrote in a language now called Provençal, also known as langue d’oc (oc was the term for “yes”) or Occitan, which became the language of the troubadours.
The texts of the troubadours were ultimately as varied as the human population; it was poetry “constructed of a play of the poetry of the commonplace.” In fact the texts were so diverse that no common structure of form could be determined and they were mostly classified by their subject matter. Richard Taruskin summarizes it eloquently in Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century:
A troubdour’s subject matter was the life he led, viewed in terms of his social relations, which were ceremonial, idealized, and